Environmental Science and Policy 114 (2020) 614–618

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Environmental Science and Policy

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envsci

Discussion

The law of regression to the tail: How to survive Covid-19, the climate
crisis, and other disasters
Bent Flyvbjerg
Major Programme Management, University of Oxford, UK

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords Regression to the mean is nice and reliable. Regression to the tail is reliably scary. We live in the age of regression
Regression to the tail to the tail. It is only a matter of time until a pandemic worse than covid-19 will hit us, and climate more extreme
Risk than any we have seen. What are the basic principles that generate such extreme risk, and for navigating it, for
Fat-tailed risk
government, business, and the public?
Covid-19
Pandemics
Climate crisis
Risk mitigation
Building back better

1. The law of regression to the tail
Sir Francis Galton coined the term "regression to the mean" – or
"regression towards mediocrity," as he originally called it, sometimes
also called "reversion to the mean." It is now a widely used concept in
statistics, describing how measurements of a sample mean will tend
towards the population mean when done in sufficient numbers,
although there may be large variations in individual measurements.
Galton illustrated his principle by the example that parents who are
tall tend to have children who grow up to be shorter than their parents,
closer to the mean of the population, and vice versa for short parents.1
In another example, made famous by Nobel-Prize winner in eco­
nomics Daniel Kahneman, pilots who performed well on recent flights
tended to perform less well on later flights, closer to the mean of per­
formance over many flights. This was not because the pilots’ skills had
deteriorated, but because their recent good performance was due not to
an improvement of skills but to lucky combinations of random events.
There is nothing as practical as a theory that is correct. Regression to
the mean has been proven mathematically for many types of statistics
and is highly useful in health, insurance, schools, on factory floors, in
casinos, and in risk management, e.g., for flight safety.
But regression to the mean presupposes that a population mean ex­
ists. For some random events of great social consequence this is not the
case.
Size-distributions of pandemics, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, wars,
and terrorist attacks, e.g., have no population mean, or the mean is ill
defined due to infinite variance. In other words, mean and/or variance
do not exist. Regression to the mean is a meaningless concept for such
distributions, whereas what one might call "regression to the tail" is
meaningful and consequential.
Regression to the tail applies to any distribution with non-vanishing
probability density towards infinity. The frequency of new extremes and
how much they exceed previous records is decisive for how fat-tailed a
distribution will be, e.g., whether it will have infinite (non-existent)
variance and mean.2 Above a certain frequency and size of extremes, the
mean increases with more events measured, with the mean eventually
approaching infinity instead of converging. In this case, regression to the
mean means regression to infinity, i.e., a non-existent mean. Deep

1
Although Galton’s theory proved right, the example he used to illustrate it proved flawed, because the height of a child is not statistically independent of the
height of its parents, due to genetics unknown to Galton. Nevertheless, it is clear what Galton was trying to prove and it turns out he was right, including for
statistically correct examples.
2
"Fat tailed" is not a well-defined, or even consistently used, concept in statistics and mathematics, not to speak of social science and psychology. A common
definition specifies fat tails as the tails of a probability distribution with a large skewness or kurtosis, relative to that of a normal (Gaussian) distribution. The larger
the skewness or kurtosis, the more fat-tailed the distribution is said to be, with the most fat-tailed distributions, e.g., Pareto distributions, having not only infinite
skewness and kurtosis but also infinite – i.e., non-existent – variance and mean. The terms "heavy tailed" and "long tailed" are sometimes used synonymously with "fat
tailed." For the science of fat tails, see Mandelbrot (1997); Mandelbrot and Hudson (2008); Taleb (2019, 2020), Clauset et al. (2009), and West (2017).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2020.08.013
Received 18 June 2020; Received in revised form 21 August 2020; Accepted 22 August 2020
Available online 5 October 2020
1462-9011/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
B. Flyvbjerg
disasters – e.g., pandemics, floods, droughts, wildfires, earthquakes,
landslides, avalanches, tsunamis, and wars – tend to follow this type of
distribution. So do crime, terrorist attacks, blackouts, financial markets,
debt, bankruptcies, and cybercrime, together with less disastrous but
financially highly risky ventures like hosting the Olympics, building
nuclear power plants, high-speed rail systems, hydroelectric dams, new
cities, and even something as apparently innocuous as procuring new IT
systems, the latter being a serious bug in current worldwide digitization
efforts.
I suggest we name this phenomenon – that events return to the tail in
sufficient size and frequency for the mean to not converge – "the law of
regression to the tail." The law depicts a situation with many extreme
events, and no matter how extreme the most extreme event is, there will
always be an event even more extreme than this. It is only a matter of
time until it appears.
I further suggest that regression to the tail is the new normal. We live
in the age of regression to the tail. Tail risks are becoming increasingly
important and common because of a more interconnected and fragile
global system of human interaction for travel, commerce, finance, etc.,
but also because the walls are coming down between natural and human
systems, with humans impacting nature at a global scale for the first time
in history, not least in terms of climate change. The pandemic and the
climate crisis are presently the two most significant manifestations of the
law and age of regression to the tail.
2. Covid-19 as regression to the tail
Prudent decision makers will not count on luck – or on conventional
Gaussian risk management, which is worse than counting on luck,
because it gives a false sense of security – when faced with risks that
follow the law of regression to the tail. Instead, decision makers will
want to do two things: (a) "cut the tail," to reduce risk by mitigation, and
(b) practice the precautionary principle, i.e., avoid tail risk altogether by
taking a cautious approach.
In any given situation, prudent decision makers and their risk man­
agers must be able to decide whether they face a situation with regres­
sion to the mean (mild Gaussian risk) or regression to the tail (extreme
fat-tailed risk), and – most importantly – to never mistake the latter for
the former. This is a difficult task, because a host of cognitive and other
biases – including simple wishful thinking and power structures that do
not welcome truth – trick us into seeing mild risk when risk is in effect
wild.
To illustrate, consider the current covid-19 pandemic. Cirillo and
Taleb, 2020 argue that pandemics (measured by number of deaths) seem
to follow a Generalized Pareto Distribution, i.e., a classic fat-tailed dis­
tribution. The law of regression to the tail is consequently pertinent,
with three important implications.
First, the covid-19 pandemic was entirely predictable. Indeed, the
pandemic was predicted years ago by people as different as Nassim
Nicholas Taleb, author of Incerto, philanthropist Bill Gates, and
numerous epidemiologists who have, deservedly, had a field day as
what-did-I-say prophets, after being ignored for years by government,
business, and media.
Second, if you understand regression to the tail it is clear what the
main mitigating measures should be once a pandemic develops, namely:
(a) cut the tail (by breaking the chain of transmissions through, e.g.,
lockdowns, personal protection equipment like face masks, testing,
development of vaccines, etc.) and (b) the precautionary principle
(rather a lockdown too many than one too few) – rolled out immediately,
at speed, and at scale, worldwide.3
Why does regression to the tail suggest precisely these measures
3
In addition, the closing of wet markets and changes to the food processing
industry would help prevent epidemics and pandemics from developing in the
first place.
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Environmental Science and Policy 114 (2020) 614–618
before others? Because the measures derive directly from tail charac­
teristics, including the fact that the spread of pandemics follow an
exponential growth curve. The tail therefore needs to be mitigated
immediately and directly, and the mentioned measures do this most
effectively. If the measures are ignored, the consequences are dire,
because 10,000 covid-19 infections today will be 80,000 infections just
nine days later, and 640,000 infections another nine days after that, etc.,
following exponential growth.
To illustrate, consider the UK’s slow response to the pandemic.
Giving evidence before the UK House of Commons Science and Tech­
nology Select Committeein June 2020, the prime minister’s former top
scientific adviser on the coronavirus outbreak and leader of Imperial
College’s Covid-19 Response Team, professor Neil Ferguson, testified,
"had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have
then reduced the final death toll by at least a half," which translates into
a minimum of 32,100 UK lives lost unnecessarily due to sluggish gov­
ernment (Hughes, 2020). For perspective, even if the UK had introduced
lockdown measures a week earlier they would still have been slower
than most other European nations, including neighboring Denmark and
Norway. At the time of writing, excess deaths4 from the virus in the UK
was 65,700, compared with 200 in Denmark and zero in Norway, and
higher than for any other European country with data (Ritchie et al.,
2020).5
Britain’s favorite crisis heuristic – "keep calm and carry on" – proved
entirely imprudent in the face of regression to the tail. "Act now, at speed,
and at scale," is the prudent response. This holds true not only for pan­
demics, but for the climate crisis and other systemic tail risks.
However, lockdowns, masks, testing, etc. happen to be contested
measures. In the United States, wearing a face mask was politicized and
became yet another issue polarizing an already heavily polarized nation.
Not until July 2020 would US President Donald Trump wear a face mask
in public, just as he openly questioned the value of testing and
lockdowns.
In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson explained on
national TV that lockdowns and telling people what to do would not sit
well with the British liberal tradition. Brits should be trusted to use
common sense, which for the prime minister himself meant – also
documented on TV – continuing to shake hands well into the second
week of March 2020 (Mason, 2020; McGuinness, 2020). At a Downing
Street press conference the prime minister explained his approach, in
what can most benevolently be described – not only in hindsight, but at
the time – as a tragically misguided attempt to instill trust with the
public: “I can tell you that I’m shaking hands continuously … I was at a
hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coro­
navirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to
know, and I continue to shake hands” (Express and Star, 2020). Un­
surprisingly, the prime minister was soon infected, and in turn likely
infected others, before ending up in intensive care for an entirely
avoidable near-death experience (BBC, 2020).
For Johnson, as for anyone, the virus clearly did not care whether he
4
Excess deaths, a.k.a. excess mortality, is considered the most reliable
measure of deaths from covid-19 and the best measure for cross-national
comparison. It is calculated for a country or a city as deaths during the
pandemic minus the average number of deaths over the previous five years for
the same period. It measures, in short, how many more people died during the
pandemic, compared with before. It is not a perfect measure, but the best there
is for now.
5
During the pandemic in the UK, it was common to see people, including
highly educated commentators, trying to explain the steep number of UK deaths
by a high level of obesity and general low level of health in the UK population
compared with other nations. Such explanations are misguided. It is not that
obesity and general health do not matter. But they are of marginal importance
in the early stages of a pandemic when speed and exponential growth of in­
fections is all-important, as rightly pointed out by Professor Neil Ferguson
above.
B. Flyvbjerg
contested the measures to mitigate it or not, or whether he acted fool­
ishly or not. Such is the nature of fat-tailed risk. It is what it is. You will
find it difficult to postulate another reality in the face of it. It will not be
ignored or swept under the carpet. Nor will it be mastered by post-truth
bluster or a stiff upper lip. Leaders who depend on such artifices to
govern will appear incompetent when faced with fat-tailed risk, as
happened for Johnson and Trump. Contested or not, the most effective
measures for mitigating pandemic fat-tailed risks are cutting the tail and
general precaution, enacted immediately, at speed, and at scale.
Initially, the measures need to be implemented across the board. This
unfortunately has grave consequences for the economy. But to not
implement the measures, or to do so inefficiently, has even graver
consequences. To illustrate, at the time of writing just over 180,000
people had died from covid-19 in the United States. The US government
sets the economic value of a saved life at 10 million dollars for policy
prioritization. That’s 1.8 trillion dollars destroyed by covid-19, growing
at 5–15 billion dollars a day at the time of writing. That is massive
wealth destruction and the numbers show that from even a narrow cost-
benefit point of view it makes good sense to mitigate as described. As
long as it costs less than one billion dollars to save 100 lives, mitigation
should continue, from a cost-benefit perspective, and you can save a lot
of lives for one billion dollars in a pandemic, if the money is spent on the
right measures. Billions, or even millions, spent up front will save tril­
lions later, as a general heuristic, which derives directly from the
exponential nature of virus growth.
Nevertheless, lockdowns must be eased as quickly as possible to limit
damage to economic and social life, without letting the virus loose again.
As soon as data are available that allow the calculation of viral repro­
duction numbers6 for specific geographies and communities, measures
can be targeted more precisely, limiting unnecessary damage to the
economy and social affairs. For example, once initial lockdowns have
brought the virus under control, further lockdowns will be necessary
only in an ad hoc manner for geographies, communities, and time pe­
riods for which infections have spiked up again. In theory, it might be
possible for whole nations to bring the virus under control solely by the
use of face masks, possibly combined with social distancing, with
everyone using masks at first, until the viral reproduction number has
been brought below 1, after which the use of masks can ease up, to be re-
introduced only for geographies, communities, and time periods for
which the viral reproduction number climbs back above 1, until the
number has been driven below 1 again, etc. For such measures, the
difference between success and failure will be small, viz., the difference
between being just below or just above a viral reproduction number of 1,
which stresses the importance of getting the measures right. Following
this type of approach, negative economic and social consequences from
the pandemic can be significantly reduced.
Third, contingencies must be in place to allow speedy scale-up. When
leaders finally understood that covid-19 was a fat-tailed phenomenon
and began to make the proper decisions, it turned out that health ser­
vices, government, and businesses were dismally underprepared, to a
degree that things as basic as supplies of face masks, gowns, and other
protective gear for health workers immediately ran out. Similarly,
testing and tracking capacity was not in place, but had to be developed
in fits and starts. The lack of reserves made it impossible to scale up
mitigation quickly and effectively, resulting in a failure to curb the virus
– just like a bank without reserves would fail in a crisis.
Innovative thinking is needed for both mitigation measures and
6
The viral reproduction number, R0, is the number of infected people that are
expected to occur on average as a result of infection by a single individual. So if
one person develops the infection and passes it on to two others, the R0 is 2. If
the average R0 in a population is greater than 1, the infection will spread
exponentially. If R0 is less than 1, the infection will spread only slowly, and will
eventually die out. The higher the value of R0 above 1, the faster an epidemic
will spread through a population.
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Environmental Science and Policy 114 (2020) 614–618
contingencies, especially before the fat tail strikes. Once it does, things
will often be too hectic to allow for effective innovation. E.g., when a
virus is spreading exponentially through a population, it is too late to
think about better and more protective gear, tracking, testing, etc.,
although some thinking and innovation "on your feet" may be possible
and valuable. But it would be like building the proverbial airplane while
flying it, which is not a good idea, but which was nevertheless the sit­
uation for covid-19. Ex ante innovative thinking and preparedness were
almost entirely absent, which is a main reason for the dismal outcome of
the pandemic in many countries, including the United States and the
United Kingdom.
After the pandemic, full-on innovation will be very much needed
again, regarding the steps humanity must make to lead economies and
societies to recovery and a better future, including better management
of tail risk. More about this below.
3. A top 10 of regression to the tail
Table 1 shows a Top Ten list of phenomena that are subject to the law
of regression to the tail, ranked by the fatness of tails. All phenomena in
the table have infinite variance, i.e., they are highly fat tailed.
We see that the fattest tail – indicating the largest and most frequent
regressions to the tail – are found for earthquakes (measured by in­
tensity), which for good reasons are often considered the archetypical
case of a power-law distributed deep disaster. Pandemics (measured by
number of deaths) are somewhere in the middle, and electricity black­
outs (measured by number of customers affected) at the bottom, but still
very fat-tailed and impactful.
We note that floods and forest fires are both subject to regression to
the tail. The same holds for droughts, hurricanes, landslides, ice melt,
sea-level changes, and other phenomena closely related to the climate
crisis, not included on the list. This tells us that understanding regression
to the tail and how to mitigate its specific manifestations for climate will
be key to mitigating the climate crisis. Here it is worth remembering that
regression to the tail for the climate crisis will be just as indifferent to
human ignorance and folly as we saw regression to the tail was for covid-
19 above. We either cut the tail and practice the precautionary principle
for the climate crisis, or we die in large numbers and destroy our eco­
nomic and social fabric, again.
4. Policy implications
Rebuilding the economy after the covid-19 pandemic will be subject
to the law of regression to the tail, if less dramatically so than the
pandemic itself. Loss of life will hopefully soon fade as a main risk.
But financial fragility, wealth destruction, and problems with debt will
Table 1
Top 10 phenomena that are subject to the law of regression to the tail, ranked
after fatness of tails. The higher on the list, the fatter the tail, and the larger and
more frequent regressions to the tail will be. All phenomena have infinite
variance. The table shows phenomena for which data were available.
Phenomenon Described in
1. Earthquakes (intensity as Richter Scale maximum Clauset et al. (2009)
peak)
2. Cybercrime (financial loss) Maillart and Sornette
(2010)
3. Wars (number of battle deaths per capita of involved Newman (2005)
nations)
4. Pandemics (number of deaths) Cirillo and Taleb (2020)
5. IT procurement (percentage size of cost overrun) Flyvbjerg et al. (2020a)
6. Floods (volume of water) Malamud and Turcotte
(2006)
7. Bankruptcies (percent of firms per year per industry) Hong et al. (2007)
8. Forest fires (size of area affected) Clauset et al. (2009)
9. Olympic Games (percentage size of cost overrun) Flyvbjerg et al. (2020b)
10. Blackouts (number of customers affected) Clauset et al. (2009)
B. Flyvbjerg
continue to be key risks for a while.
The massive stimulus spending programmes that governments use to
restart economies in recession typically comprise giant construction and
investment projects with fat-tailed financial risks, like multi-billion-
dollar megaprojects in IT, transport, energy, water, education, hous­
ing, health, and defense (Flyvbjerg, 2017).
Some projects are more fat-tailed than others, i.e., they are more
susceptible to the law of regression to the tail. Data analytics should be
used to separate fat-tailed projects from thin-tailed ones, and stick with
the latter whenever possible. We know how to do this.
For instance, nuclear power plants are bespoke, slow to build, and fat
tailed for financial and safety risks; whereas wind farms and energy
storage are modular, fast, and thin tailed. By choosing wind over nu­
clear, the risk of regression to the tail will be significantly reduced, and
climate goals will be achieved sooner.
Every investment alternative must be assessed in this manner to
ensure that stimulus spending becomes a boost instead of a drag on the
economy. The latter is happening more often than we like to think
(Ansar et al., 2014, 2016, 2017; Detter and Fölster, 2015; Flyvbjerg,
2017; Kanter, 2015; Ren, 2017).
In addition to this, leaders should think about investment priorities
coming out of the crisis and how to best restart the economy, taking into
account what we have learnt from the crisis. Such priorities include:
4.1. Re-building health and social care services
The crisis has brought many health and care facilities, including for
the elderly, to a breaking point, revealing that the safety of both em­
ployees and patients was compromised in ways that most would not
have imagined. There will be a requirement to invest in people and fa­
cilities to rebuild these services.
4.2. Decarbonizing the economy
The crisis must be used to accelerate the transition to an electric,
zero-carbon economy. This includes (a) investments in renewable en­
ergy (and maybe nuclear, if it can be made fast and safe) for powering
industry and households; (b) electrification of trains, trucks, public
transport, and cars; and (c) investments to improve true sustainability of
farming, food manufacture, housing, and commercial real estate.
4.3. Digitization
We are unlikely to return to the same state of the world as when we
entered the pandemic. Remote working has the potential to become
more prevalent after the crisis. Investments might shift from face-to-face
working (and lower the cost of office real estate and time for
commuting). Stimulus spending should focus investments on the en­
ablers of this new approach to work, e.g., 5 G rollouts, broadband
infrastructure, satellites for global reach, server farms for adequate ca­
pacity, etc.
4.4. Traffic reduction measures
Few investments have historically been made to change the demand
for transportation infrastructure. Investments have tended to expand
supply-side capacity following the heuristic “predict and provide”.
Lockdowns and stay-at-home measures have reduced traffic and pollu­
tion levels. The gradual restart of the economy should be used to prevent
traffic demand from returning to pre-crisis levels, turning the focus
upside down from supply-side to demand-side management, following
the heuristic “predict and prevent.”
4.5. Mega compensation schemes
There is likely to be a host of post-pandemic litigation, including
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Environmental Science and Policy 114 (2020) 614–618
massive class-action suits, to recoup losses or seek redress for negli­
gence. To prevent this from running amok and hampering the restart of
the economy, comprehensive compensation and settlement schemes
should be designed and ready for implementation.
The above measures and priorities do not lessen the urgency for
prudence, here understood as Aristotelian phronesis (Flyvbjerg, 2001;
Flyvbjerg et al., 2012). In fact, it raises its importance, especially as -
arguably and sadly – phronesis does not characterize senior and middle
management decision making more generally and at times of crisis. This
is the case for even top political leaders like presidents and prime
ministers, as we saw above, despite the fact that they need phronesis
more than anyone, or their citizens will suffer for the lack of it, as they
do at present. Rescher (1995: 177) rightly observes that randomness is
best influenced by prudence. With the extreme randomness generated
by regression to the tail, prudence therefore becomes particularly
important, in the shape of common caution, hedging one’s bets, keeping
contingencies, providing insurance for all, and similar prudent
measures.
Finally, to be effective, prudence must be based on dialogue and
deliberation, something stressed already by Aristotle. The social and
economic infrastructure must be in place to facilitate the development of
new, future approaches to pandemics and the climate crisis, shaping a
new world in the process. If nothing else, efforts to prepare for and avoid
the next pandemic would need a very strong, persistent, and ongoing
rhetoric to be funded over time to keep attention on fat-tail phenomena
alive and institutionalize it across policy, business, and everyday life, in
the absence of events which justify such expenditure. This is another
front on which we have failed miserably in the past and on which we
cannot afford to fail in the future, as the world gets evermore connected.
5. Implications for the climate crisis
We are lucky that the covid-19 pandemic is not worse than it is –
specifically that mortality for those infected is not higher – because
everything we know about pandemics tells us mortality might as well
have been significantly higher, and that sooner or later there will be a
pandemic like that, worse than the worst to date. That’s the nature of
fat-tailed risk as depicted by the law of regression to the tail.
A positive way to view covid-19 is to see it as a much-needed op­
portunity for humanity to exercise its skills in managing regression to
the tail. We need those skills to survive as a species and to build a world
that is worth surviving in. Covid-19 may be seen as a dress rehearsal for
how to deal with the climate crisis; a crash course in how to mitigate
regression to the tail. When we study the pandemic carefully it offers us
the basic principles needed to mitigate other fat-tailed risks, the climate
crisis included. Seen from this perspective, despite its indisputable
tragedy, covid-19 is a much-needed, large-scale survival exercise for
humankind on planet earth.
Mitigating the climate crisis involves “thinking in long time scales
while acting with furious urgency,” as observed by Mingle (2020: 51).
Science tells us we have maybe a decade or two where we can still in­
fluence global warming, ice melt, and sea level change. Then it will be
too late. Missing this window of opportunity is a scary prospect. The
good news is, however, that covid-19 has served as a wake-up call and
has demonstrated that the world, or at least parts of it, are capable of the
speedy, concerted effort and massive involvement from government,
science, business, and banks that are necessary to solve an urgent
problem that threatens humanity as such. We did not know this
pre-covid-19, because the ability had never been tested.
The covid-19 pandemic has taught us what to do and not to do in the
face of regression to the tail. Two lessons stand out.
First, everyone needs to be honest about, and keep in mind, that
there will be more extreme events in the future. There will be more
pandemics, and one of these will be worse than covid-19. This uncom­
fortable fact follows directly from the fat-tailed distribution of pan­
demics and the associated law of regression to the tail.
B. Flyvbjerg
Second, once leaders and citizens understand that pandemics involve
regression to the tail, they will also understand how to handle the next
pandemic. Specifically, four effective mitigation measures apply, when
faced with regression to the tail:
a) cutting the tail, by eliminating specific tail risks;
b) using the precautionary principle, i.e., avoiding tail risk by taking a
cautious approach;
c) making sure the necessary contingencies are in place; and
d) acting immediately, at blitz-like speed, and at scale, when the tail
rears.
The two lessons and four measures are general. They derive directly
from the mathematical and statistical properties of fat-tailed distribu­
tions and apply not only to pandemics, but to all phenomena that are
subject to the law of regression to the tail, for instance: floods, droughts,
wildfires, earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, wars, avalanches, crime,
terrorist attacks, blackouts, big infrastructure projects, and more.
In sum, covid-19 is a stark reminder of three things.
First, extreme events will haunt humankind, over and over. It is only
a matter of time until an event will occur that is more extreme than the
most extreme to date. This is the "law of regression to the tail."
Second, historically we have been dismal at managing regression to
the tail, today maybe more than ever with the lean, optimized, and
highly interconnected global system we have created.
Third, with the tail risks currently facing humanity in terms of, e.g.,
climate, the pandemic, rebuilding the economy after the pandemic, and
global debt, we cannot afford leadership that ignores or underestimates
regression to the tail.
Using covid-19 to truly understand the basic principles of regression
to the tail, and then putting those principles effectively to work in
mitigating the major risks we currently face – paramountly the climate
crisis – may well be key to our survival as a species, or at least survival of
life as we know it. If we do this, covid-19 would not be a wasted crisis.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The author reports no declarations of interest.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Dr. Alexander Budzier, professor Henrik
Flyvbjerg, professor Carissa Véliz, and the review team at the journal for
highly useful comments and suggestions for improvements to an earlier
version of the paper.
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